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Sap Flow Meter | Updates | Github

Project Leads: Ryan Christensen

Overview

Our aim is to make a low-cost, accurate open-source sensor to directly measure the water consumption of a tree.

Description

A lot of work has gone into determining best-practices for keeping a healthy orchard. Extension services provide advice on everything from soil amendments and fertilization to which pesticides to use and when to spray. However, less is known about water usage. How much water do trees use? Is the orchard getting irrigated evenly? Does it have adequate drainage? Measuring the sap flow gives you access to that information, since sap is primarily water. If you measure the sap flow on every tree, you can correlate water usage with fruit size and quality to determine the optimal watering practices.

Objectives

• Accurate measurements
• Long battery life
• Easy to build
• Low-cost
• Live Twitter updates

Outcomes

What are the results of the project? Include any graphs and pictures.

Future

• Improve probe robustness and manufacturability
• Allow remote access of logged data
• Automatically adjust heat pulse intensity
• Reduce power consumption of probe communication

Resource List

• SdFat
• OPEnS RTC
• Low-Power
• Protothreads
• DSPlite
• RadioHead
• ArduinoJSON
• FeatherFault
• ASF core commit f6ffa8b
• Plog

Tutorials

• Learning About Adafruit Feathers
• Installing a webserver on Raspberry pi
• Surface-mount soldering

Keywords

Refrences

• Burgess, Stephen S. O., Mark A. Adams, Neil C. Turner, Craig R. Beverly, Chin K. Ong, Ahmed A. H. Khan, and Tim M. Bleby. "An Improved Heat Pulse Method to Measure Low and Reverse Rates of Sap Flow in Woody Plants †." Tree Physiology 21.9 (2001): 589-98. Web.